TalentBin raises $2M to mash up data on job prospects

Recruiters can glean information on potential hires from pages on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and other sites, but assembling the big picture about a prospect can take time. TalentBin draws from social sites and sites that are, well, not social — the U.S. Patent and Trade Office, for instance — and ranks people who fit a recruiter’s parameters.

The San Francisco startup said Tuesday that it has raised $2 million in Series A money, bringing the total raised to $4 million. Lightbank led the round, and Charles River Ventures, First Round Capital, Foundation Capital, FundersClub and NEA also contributed. The new money will help the company add salespeople and get TalentBin onto more recruiters’ computer screens. Also the idea is to push into more industries.

TalentBin originated in 2010 as Unvarnished, a site where professionals could post reviews of other professionals, by invitation only. Later that year the company opened up the floodgates for anyone to use and changed its name to Honestly.com. In May 2012, having realized the difficulty of getting people to generate content on the site, the company pivoted to TalentBin to bring in data from lots of already popular sites.

In competing for the attention of recruiters, TalentBin runs up against a few other tools capitalizing on input from multiple websites, including Bullhorn, Gild and Silp. All the same, it does seem like it’s got a wide range of sources that could crawl lots of sites and populate a whole new database of possible job candidates. For recruiters starved for leads, it could be another useful tool.

TalentBin has already gotten traction with more than 200 customers, including some big companies — Amazon.com, Bloomberg, Facebook, Microsoft, UPS. The question is whether TalentBin can build out rich databases of people eligible for work in lower-tech sectors.

This story was updated 11:20 a.m. PT with additional detail on TalentBin’s investors.